Taken for Granted

Today at DATE (some pictures of the keynote on the web page) – the last day of the conference and exhibition (tomorrow is Workshop day), was Multicore Applications Day.   I attended three of the sessions – speaking in one, on a panel in another, observing in a third, and also attended the lunchtime keynote.   This was an extremely interesting day.   At the end of the day I was torn between the final Multicore panel on programming multicore, and a technical session on ASIPs for wireless – and went to the ASIPs for wireless (Baseband Processors for MIMO and UWB Communication Systems).  Too many good things going on in parallel.

The first session was an embedded tutorial on Understanding Multicore Technologies.  I spoke on multicore architectures, Pierre Paulin on Programming Models and Rainer Leupers on Multicore Design Environments.  I found the secret of getting lots of people to come up to you after the session – include a couple of impossibly long URLs on a couple of slides and offer to send the slides if people come up to you after the session to give you a card!

Pierre Paulin in his talk coined some new terms:   The “CoresRUs”, “Coremporium”, “Corerama” and reused the hot term from a few years ago – we want to avoid “Corezilla”.   To add my own atrocious pun to the mix, I would add we want also to avoid a “Coretastrophe”.

Our modern “Corezilla”

Rainer Leupers stated unequivocally and clearly (and in large letters) on one of his slides, what has also  become a bit of a credo for myself:

Multicore design = ESL design

This is something that many people still don’t realise.  ESL is both an enabler of and necessary for successful multicore/MPSoC design.

The Multicore Products for Mass Market Applications session had a particularly interesting talk by Kees van Berkel of ST-Ericsson on Multicore for Mobile Phones which had lots of good analysis of processing requirements and how they have changed over time with standards, and how they have pushed architectural development.   He has a paper in the proceedings that includes a number of his analyses and if you lay a hand on a copy you should find it of interest.

Attendance stayed pretty good up until the last sessions.  All in all, with the chances to meet interesting new people and old friends and have some vigorous and useful technical interchanges, DATE 2009 lived up to my expectations.  And there are still workshops to go tomorrow.